3,300-Year-Old Egyptian Cemetery Reveals Commoners' Plight

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While an Egyptian pharaoh built majestic temples filled with
sparkling treasures, the lower classes performed backbreaking
work on meager diets, new evidence suggests.

An analysis of more than 150 skeletons from a 3,300-year-old
cemetery at the ancient
Egyptian city of Amarna reveals fractures, wear and tear from
heavy lifting, and rampant malnutrition amongst the city's
commoners.

The discovery, detailed in the March issue of the journal
Antiquity, could shed light on how the non-elites of ancient
Egyptian society lived.

Overnight city

For a brief, 17-year period, the center of Egypt was Amarna, a
small city on the banks of the Nile, about 218 miles (350
kilometers) south of Cairo.

But after Akhenaten's death, the next pharaoh, Tutankhamun
, promptly rolled up the experiment. The city, which lacked good
agricultural land, was soon abandoned.

Because the Egyptians occupied Amarna for such a short time, the
city provides archaeologists with an unprecedented insight into
what people's lives looked like at a specific moment in history,
said study co-author Anna Stevens, an archaeologist at the
University of Cambridge.

To see what these everyday Egyptians' daily lives were like,
Stevens and her colleagues analyzed 159 skeletons that were found
mostly intact.

The researchers' conclusions: Life was hard at Amarna. The
children had stunted growth, and many of the bones were porous
due to
nutritional deficiency, probably because the commoners lived
on a diet of mostly bread and beer, Stevens told LiveScience.

More than three-quarters of the adults had degenerative joint
disease, likely from hauling heavy loads, and about two-thirds of
these adults had at least one broken bone.

The findings suggest that the rapid construction of Amarna may
have been especially hard on the commoners. Based on the size of
the bricks found in nearby structures, each worker likely carried
a limestone brick weighing 154 pounds (70 kilograms) in
assembly-line fashion. Erecting the city's structures so quickly
would have required workers to repeatedly carry out such heavy
lifting. That could have caused the joint disease the skeletons
revealed.

The norm in Egypt?

"This is a fabulous study because it is a big population from a
known site, and we have all these bodies from people who are
relatively lower class," said Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at
American University in Cairo, who was not involved in the study.

But because, in total, archaeologists have unearthed so few
ancient Egyptian cemeteries in which the non-elite were buried,
it's possible that these backbreaking conditions prevailed across
Egypt at the time, Stevens said.